How to Understand Emotions | Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a world expert in the science of emotions. She explains what emotions are and how the brain represents and integrates signals from our body and the environment to crea

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I’m Andrew huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at nor Eastern University she also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she is the chief scientific officer of the center of law brain and behavior Dr Barett is considered one of the top World experts in the study of emotions and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of Psychology and Neuroscience indeed today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions you will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states you also learn how emotions relate to things like motivation Consciousness and affect affect is a term that refers to a more General State of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions during today’s discussion Dr Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others you’ll also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body in fact much of today’s discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions and it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways it certainly was surprising to me I’ve been a close follower of Dr Feldman Barrett’s work over many years now and have always found it to be tremendously informative and when I say her work I mean both her academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she’s given and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain the first one entitled how emotions are made and the second book which includes information about emotions but extends beyond that entitled seven and a half lessons about the brain as you’ll see from today’s discussion Dr Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion she’s also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways you’ll also notice several times she pushes back on my questions in some cases even telling me that my questions are ill posed and I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that she did that because you’ll see that every time she did that it was with the clear purpose purpose of putting more specificity on the question and thereby more specificity and Clarity on the answer which of course she delivers by the end of today’s discussion you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body you will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states and moreover you’ll have many practical Tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various States of Consciousness before we begin I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I’ve spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance one of the key things to getting a great night’s sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that’s because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature has to drop by 1 to 3° and in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed your body temperature actually has to increase by 1 to 3° with eight sleep it’s very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment it’s a mattress cover that allows you to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning middle and end of your night and in doing so allow you to fall and stay deeply asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling extremely refreshed I started sleeping on an eight- sleep mattress cover well over 2 years ago and it has greatly improve the quality of my sleep if you’d like to try eights sleep you can go to 8sleep. com huberman to save up to $150 off their pod 3 cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that’s eights sleep. com huberman today’s episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how how different foods and behaviors affect your health by giving you real-time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor one of the most important factors impacting your immediate and long-term health is the way that your body manages its blood glucose or sometimes referred to as blood sugar levels to maintain energy and focus throughout the day you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or dips using levels you can monitor how different types of foods and different food combinations as well as food timing and things like exercise combined to impact your blood glucose levels I started using levels a little over a year ago and it gave me a lot of insight into how specific Foods were spiking my blood sugar and then leaving me feeling tired for several hours afterwards as well as how the spacing of exercise and my meals was impacting my overall energy and in doing so it really allowed me to optimize how I eat what I eat when I exercise and so on such that my blood glucose levels and energy levels are stable throughout the day if you’re interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous gluc post monitor yourself go to levels. l/ huberman right now levels is offering an additional two free months of membership again that’s levels. linkli nkh huberman to get two free months of membership and now for my discussion with Dr Lisa Feldman Barret Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett welcome wow it’s my pleasure to be here I’ve wanted to talk to you for a very long time I’d like to talk about emotions I think everyone one has a sense somehow of what an emotion is feeling happy feeling sad feeling excited feeling uh Curious perhaps is even an emotion I don’t know you’ll tell us what are the core components what are the sort of macronutrients of a of an emotion uh because I know there’s a debate about whether or not we should be talking about emotions versus States but what is an emotion we all are familiar with what one feels like to us but from a scientific perspective how do you define an emotion well SCI this is a scientist debate about this um nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is um and I think from my perspective the interesting but tricky bit is that anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion none of those basic building block blocks are specific to emotion so for example there are a group of scientists who will tell you well an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in um some physical state a change in the brain a change in the physical state um which um leads you to make a particular facial expression so you’ve got physiological changes in the body